Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Meeting the Hangman

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By Heathcote Williams I used to speak out against capital punishment From a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner. This was when it was thought that hanging people Was helpful in maintaining order. One day someone called Barry Trenoweth came over. His father, Gordon, had been hanged for murder. He’d killed a shopkeeper in Falmouth during the […]

Books That Truly Were Something Else

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My staff of thousands informs me that “The Something Else Press Collection” just went on the market. Although some of the books are rarer than others, it’s the collection as a whole that’s notable. Early titles included Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface, Dick Higgins’ collection of performance scores and art polemics; correspondence art pioneer Ray Johnson’s […]

The Strange Case of Orwell’s Typewriter

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My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times. — D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life Why did George Orwell’s widow give the typewriter to the paper? And where was […]

Trump Detour: Via Bernie’s Home State

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Once upon a time — in Vermont, of all places — Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a counterfactual satire about American politics. Never having cracked the book myself, I’m grateful to Chris Braithwaite for relating its details. “If you’ve been as gob smacked as I have by The Donald phenomenon,” he writes in the […]

Headstone With Michaux Text Superimposed

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This drawing is from a series of ‘Headstones’ by Gerard Bellaart. “buries everything outside of himself everything he has known up to now everything that surrounds him with scorn” — Henri Michaux And here is the artist Arman’s actual headstone ‘Alone at Last’ in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. The irony of course is […]

Horrorscope

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Mary Beach could draw horoscope charts in great detail. It was a serious hobby of hers. She only did them for people she knew, and if they piqued her interest. I completely forgot she had done mine — it was so long ago, circa 1967. An old friend reminded me the other day of what […]

There Is Joy in Making Music

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In a video trailer for Finnegan Shanahan’s debut album from New Amsterdam Records, David Bloom conducts the new music ensemble Contemporaneous in a passage from “The Two Halves: Music for a Hudson River Railroad Dream Map.” The piece is a 35-minute song cycle described in a press release as “deft violin work and ethereal vocals […]

Trump Detour: Orwell Recalls a Fascist’s Rally

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Eighty years ago today George Orwell witnessed the British Fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley* speaking to a full house at a public meeting in the Yorkshire coal-mining town of Bransley. Orwell was shocked by what happened. It’s worth remembering his notes about the experience, given Donald Trump’s rallies these days. Writing in his diary that “M […]

The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries

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Michael Butterworth’s new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order — recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. — tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and […]

Coming Soon: The Wild Tale of the Paneros

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When a young Spanish director began making a film about a mad family of poets “during the waning days of the Franco dictatorship,” Aaron Shulman writes in the current issue of The Believer, it was intended to be a short documentary. Titled “El Desencanto” (“The Disenchanted”), the film “ended up spilling into a ninety-one minute […]

Not a Peep about the Oscars, Thank God

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I’ve said his writing “had the density of Hart Crane poems” and that I was exaggerating “only a little.” That’s because I was recalling his column in the Chicago Sun-Times, when he roved the art galleries reviewing photography shows. (He had been the film critic of the Chicago Daily News before it folded, but that […]

From ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’

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He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a limbo purged of desire . . . If that is what is meant by going back into one’s heart, could anything be better, in this world or the next? The mind, dim and hushed like a […]

Extracted, Diffracted, Destroyed

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The poem is composed of words extracted from Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and mashed up in a collage that bends their meaning, so that it’s a diffraction as much as an extraction. The drawing by Gerard Bellaart is titled “Study Apotheosis Lubertus Swaanzwijk.” It was executed in 2014, in color pencil and casein tempera, […]

Interview: The Skinny on the Beats

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Hilary Holladay: How would you size up the significance of the Beats as writers rather than as personalities? Jan Herman: Kerouac has had a huge influence on readers worldwide. I’m sure that more people have read On the Road than ever read “Howl.” But Ginsberg may be more significant as a writer than Kerouac in […]

‘Buried Child’ Surfaces in New Revival

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Sam Shepard recently referred to “Buried Child” as “the same clunky play” it always was, rewrites notwithstanding. That’s Shepard being candid. That’s Shepard being Shepard. Never mind that awkward dramaturgy and a little too much speechifying dialogue didn’t keep the play from winning the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama or Shepard from being declared the […]

Nelson Algren’s Walk Through Appalachia

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I have always loved the way A Walk on the Wild Side begins. Show me a more perceptive opening of an American novel with its historical tracing of an Appalachian clan (let alone the lyrical brilliance of its prose) and I’ll buy you dinner. The novel introduces Fitz Linkhorn on the first page — a […]

This High Jiver Is One Helluva Surviver

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“I am sociable, outgoing, quite extroverted, misanthropic at times yet other times quite philanthropic. I tend to contradict myself, wear a peculiar countenance from lack of sleep, despise insipid conversations, I get on my own nerves, spell like a fifth grader, use my diagnosis of florid ADHD as an excuse for the loquacious tendencies I […]

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